Getting Around the Americas: The Hudson 70 Expedition

Author: Charles T. Schafer and Roger Smith

ISBN 978-1-62137-076-5 (softcover)

69 pages

The first circumnavigation of the Americas was accomplished by the Canadian Survey Ship Hudson in an 11 month voyage (1969 – 1970). She carried an international team of marine scientists along with a large contingent of Bedford Institute of Oceanography (BIO) researchers to a number of remote and poorly-documented parts of four of the world’s oceans, and to a group of unsurveyed fiords along the Chilean coast. The expedition established Canada’s global-scale interest in the oceans including their biology, seafloor environments and the geological characteristics of their underlying basins. Dr. C. Mann and the Captain D. Butler, two Canadian federal government employees, were among the outstanding members of the Hudson 70 Coordintaing Committee that, respectively, guided the development of the expedition’s scientific program and ensured safety-minded ship’s operations under a range of weather and sea ice conditions. Data gathered during the circumnavigation were still being analyzed and published in the scientific literature as late as the early 1990s.

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

Charles Schafer completed his Ph.D. in marine micropaleontology at NYU in the late 60s and worked as a Research Scientist at Canada’s Bedford Institute of Oceanography (BIO) in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia. Following his retirement from full-time research in 1995, he remained actively involved in marine environmental and paleoclimate research under an emeritus appointment from Natural Resources Canada. The Hudson 70 book idea germinated in the fall of 2009 during BIO’s 40th anniversary celebration of the voyage where he was reunited with several of the expedition’s participants. One of them (his co-author) had brought along a personal collection of more than 500 photographs taken during the 11 month-long voyage. The rest is history.

Roger Smith graduated from Canada’s Queen’s University in the 70s with a B.Sc. in Engineering Geology and an M.Sc. in Marine Geology. He participated on most of the legs of the Hudson ’70 Expedition, assisting in the collection of geological and micropaleontological samples. Roger spent his professional career working in the oil and gas exploration industry in Canada and internationally. After his retirement in 2009, he joined the boards of several companies. At about the same time, he and a few associates set up a small oil and gas company in Calgary that will keep him focused on geological problem solving for some time to come.